dispositions of the Indians and trample under their foot the scattered seeds sown in that benighted region. We are all well, I recommend myself, etc.
Dear Sir.--After many journeys in the deserts of North America I am at last in my native land, happy to be able to express to the benefactors of the poor Indian all the gratitude of the missionaries.
Since my last departure from Belgium I have traveled prairies where no mission had ever been established - indeed, where no European probably had ever been.
We ascended the Missouri for about 730 leagues, and crossed a plateau of over loo on the upland that separates the waters of the Yellowstone from those of the Missouri. From the Yellowstone we proceeded southwest marching about 300 leagues to the Black Hills and Wolf Mountains. spurs of the Rocky Mountains. We left these hills at the great road leading from the Rocky Mountains to California.
On the 2d of September, 1851, we were on this highway trodden by the whites hastening these latter years to the gold mines. The road is fine, broad, and perhaps the longest in the world. On the track of the emigrant caravans you can travel easily from the frontier settlements to the Pacific. This immense avenue is like a barn-floor swept by the winds. No blade of grass springs up, so unceasingly is it trodden by the feet of thousands of Americans and Europeans hastening to California. Our Indians, who had seen only pathless wastes, crossed at most by a hunter's trail, thought, on beholding it, that the whole nation of the whites had passed over it, and that the land of the sunrise must be depopulated. They could hardly believe me when I told
a Letter I, Second Series, Western Missions and Missionaries. To the Chevalier DIEUDONNt STAB, Editor of the Journal de Bruxelles, Brussels, June 30, 1853.